Thinking Back on My Spiritual Odyssey Part 5

 In this ongoing discussion so far, I have sorted through a lot, and today I wanted to just share some memories of what my vision of church was.  This is something very detailed, and it is multifaceted, so bear with me as I begin this stroll down a very ancient part of my story.

As a young minister, heavily influenced by liturgical worship and with a vision for reshaping what it was to be Pentecostal at the time, I had a definite vision for the church I wanted.  Like many aspiring young ministers then, I was looking to have the big megachurch, one in which thousands of people would attend each week, and it was going to be a different type of megachurch for me.  Much of my inspiration came from several sources.  For one, I saw the ministries of people such as Earl Paulk and John Meares as being models of what I wanted - these were Pentecostal ministers who essentially had built liturgical churches, they wore clerical collars, and they were what I wanted to be.  Later, I would become extremely disillusioned with Paulk though, as a series of sex scandals as well as a veering into heretical doctrines would taint his legacy (for one, his actual nephew ended up being his biological son due to an affair he had with his sister-in-law years earlier, and then there was the whole Mona Brewer mess - Paulk really messed with her life badly), but I had gotten to actually see his church outside Atlanta, Chapel Hill Harvester Church, and I loved its design and its vision then.  Another inspiration for me was Presbyterian minister and culture warrior Dr. D. James Kennedy, who pastored Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale and I loved the design of that church too, in particular the huge and beautiful Ruffati organ that had been designed by Diane Bish, who played it almost every Sunday.  The great organ in that church featured pipes in front that looked like trumpets, and it was magnificent.  I also appreciated Dr. Kennedy's pulpit, a high structure with a "hood" with a light fixture which one went up to on a winding staircase.  I also appreciated Dr. Kennedy's intellectual ability - he was a theologian in the truest sense, and the way he carried himself was something I wanted to emulate. Another influence I had was one I will talk about shortly, that being the Assyrian and Armenian Christians I had worked with for many years - I thought I was called to them, but they ended up converting me in the long-term.  All of these things, and my own propensity to create architectural drawings in graphite, led me to draw many pictures of the great church I envisioned.  It had a huge central dome, twin bell towers, and an elaborate staircase with a large reflecting pool in front of it. On the inside, I had designed it unlike the typical Pentecostal churches I had been part of - the altar was central, and the pulpit was to the left of the main platform.  Behind the altar was a large orchestra pit, with the great organ occupying a central place smack in the middle of it, and a baby grand piano to the right.  Rising behind the orchestra pit was the choir loft, and overshadowing it were the massive pipes of the organ.  The baptistry, which in Protestant traditions was in the center/back of the platform area, would be located in my church in an alcove off to the left side of the sanctuary, and was accessible via a set of two spiral staircases which led up to a baptismal pool in which a fountain of water would supply fresh water to the baptistry.  It was surrounded by tall stain-glass windows in the alcove depicting events from the life of Christ.  I have those drawings still, and here is first the external view and then the front platform:

These are two of them I managed to find, but I drew this a lot over the years, and it was my dream church.  In time though, I started having a bigger vision for this, as it involved my work with Assyrians and Armenians.

I got involved during my junior year of high school with political activism for two prominent but persecuted communities of Middle Eastern Christians, the Armenians and Assyrians.  In the coming years after I graduated high school and went to college, I would actually befriend clergy and political and ideological leaders among these people, which would culminate in a visit to California in December 1995 when I would actually be on radio out there with Dr. Sargon Dadesho, a leading Assyrian nationalist who operated the Bet Nahrain Organization as well as an Assyrian-language TV and radio station in Turlock, CA, called KBES.  I wanted to do something grand for these people, and one of the things I proposed in my mind and then wrote up a plan for was what I called the Saint Isaac of Nineveh Village.  It was to be a completely self-governed city that would serve as a refuge for Middle Eastern Christians, and my dream church would sit in the middle of it on an island in a lake as sort of a basilica. I saw many things in this vision too - a great aquarium and zoo, community gardens, a university, and even a security force for the community too.  It would be in essence a self-sustaining city which would also use revolutionary technologies and other things.  Perhaps the closest comparison I could note for this in real life is the town of Ave Maria, FL, which was built with a similar vision - a fully Catholic community centered around a premiere Catholic university. I would literally get goose bumps thinking about this back in the day, as it was perhaps one of the most ambitious yet also a beautiful plan, and perhaps had I had marketing abilities I could have made this a reality.  However, being I am 55 years old now, the chances of that happening are extremely slim unless in the future someone comes across my dusty plans and decides to take an inspirational initiative from it.  Perhaps, if you are reading this in the future, may God bless such a person if they can do this, because it would be a great service to a longsuffering ethnoreligious community that could really benefit from it. 

Over the years, as my old zeal began to settle into reality-land and I focused more on earning an income to support my family, much of those visions and dreams fell by the wayside and I did keep the original stuff I did as a sort of memory to remind me of them,  Whether building a magnificent church like that, or even going further and constructing a whole specialized city, these ambitions would take literally millions of dollars to even start working on them.  And it would take decades for them to even be fully realized too.  I think of that guy in Frostburg, MD, who was building an ark as a church called "God's Ark of Safety."  He too had ambitious plans, but in all honesty all he did was build a steel frame which still stands today along I-70 outside Frostburg, rusting and never even  being close to completion.  It is natural for human beings to dream big, but when the realization sets in about what needs to be invested in those dreams, it can be a dealbreaker. And, it is something I have come to accept, especially since for the past 25 years I have been a faithful Catholic and am content to just serve the Church in a lay capacity as an educator.  But, a part of me misses that excitement and ambition, and I often imagine what it would have been like if I could have pulled it off.  I have had some dreams about the church in particular over the years, and it looked quite magnificent in my dreams.  The odd thing about one or two of the dreams were that the settings of them were on what looks like the campus of my alma mater, Southeastern University.  Other dreams had the church in a big city somewhere, located on a street with an incline.  I often do muse that perhaps maybe I could submit my church architecture drawings to an archdiocesan building fund somewhere for a potential large parish or a cathedral - but then again, maybe not. So, do I regret the forgotten dreams?  That is a complex answer I will explore now.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to do things I was interested in with a large flare, and it started with my toy Noah's Ark set I got from Mom as a kid.  I had a huge collection  of plastic animals of every species imaginable, and I recall lining them up around the side of Granny's old house processing into a small ark in which not all of them would actually fit.  Then was my music collection - up until this time last year, I had perhaps the dream collection of vintage big band recordings, something I salivated over since my teen years.  It was somewhat devastating to lose the 3200 CDs, LPs, DVDs, and assorted 78 RPMs, 45 RPMs, and wax cylinder recordings I had housed in two huge cabinets in my old office in Hagerstown.  That collection took me the better part of 30 years to assemble, but thankfully I was able to salvage some of the best parts of it.  Often, when something is ripped away like that from me, I tend to regroup.   Spiritually it is the same - for many years after becoming Catholic, I had to rethink so much.  After all, I was a minister in a major Pentecostal tradition, and now I was unable to do that anymore so I had to redefine what my role would be in a Catholic setting.  That can be a process, and it often is not easy,  and to be honest I still have days I struggle with it.  But, it is no accident God led me to where he led me, and I am Catholic for a reason.  I have learned to develop an attitude of trust and faith in God in order to let him guide me where he wants me, and for now, that is teaching at the Jesuit high school I work at.  I am not sure if this will be a long-term vocation or if it is just for a season of my life, but it nonetheless is where God wants me.  And, if it is just a short season, I trust God to open doors.  I am not the person I was at 23 though that is for sure, and the whole point of these reflections is to meditate on that.  But, it was fun revisiting some things, and perhaps God wanted me to do that too, who's to say?  Anyway, I just wanted to share some concluding thoughts and then I can wrap this up.

The old drawings and dreams represent an apt conclusion to these reflections now, and as I assess this all, there are some things that actually did happen.  I mean, for one, I am a Ph.D. now, although not in the way I originally wanted to go.  Also, despite not ever seeing my dream of that magnificent church realized, I am - and have been part of - a member of a beautiful Catholic parish that personifies a portion of my dreams.  Both St. James the Greater Church in Charles Town, WV, as well as SS. Philip and James Parish here in Baltimore are both parish churches that I have always wanted to be part of, and to a degree I see some of my old dreams and drawings in them too.  Also, despite the fact I never got to pastor a church, I am still exercising a pastoral role in a way as a teacher in a Catholic school.  While I may never know the total impact I had on students, God does know that, and in time I will see the fruits of my labor.  I am in a place 33 years after the fact of my initial dreams and drawings I never imagined being, and in a way I may have fulfilled what I needed to do.  However, my life is not over yet, and there are still many years ahead to see what happens.  So, that leads to three valuable lessons I wanted to close with, and they are as follows:

1. Write down your dreams, visions, and testimony - it will serve you well later, and also may be an inspiration to someone else.

2.  Never forget where you come from - it will keep you humble. 

3. There are times when we all need a little recharge in our lives - perhaps we feel discontented, burnt-out, or discouraged.  Recalling our old zeal may awaken something in us if we reflect upon it. 

And, that is essentially where these reflections end - not with fireworks, but just with a couple of life lessons.  In time, I may share more, but now you helped me reflect and revisit, and hopefully it will be an encouragement to one who reads this.  Thanks again, and see you next time!

Thinking Back on My Spiritual Odyssey Part 4

 In the last story, I talked about mostly my early battles against the "Emerging Church" movement in the early 2010s when I was still doing graduate work.  This part of the story is going to come back to what my own spiritual odyssey is, as I went down a lot of rabbit trails and probably will enter some more as I do this. 

So, another aspect I talked about is regarding zeal in my faith.  When I was younger, zeal came easy - it does with youth for some reason.  When I hear certain types of religious music - the Kathryn Kuhlman crusade songs I talked about earlier, for example - it gives me fond memories of those days.  Not everything about my Pentecostal past was bad, and in all honesty there are things I miss.  The whole point of my conversation is to explore that.  Again, I am not sure how long this is going to be, and I am just sharing thoughts as they come to me, but sorting through all of this is like going through an old box of mementos you come across in an attic.  We all do have mental attics too - a lot of memories and things get stored away in our minds, and on occasion we have to kind of do a little digging just to rediscover things about ourselves.  In essence, that is what I am doing - I am rummaging through my own dusty mental attic, and there's much to sort out.  This has been a little different than many of my recent musings, as for the first time in a few years I have a focused objective rather than just a bunch of off-the-cuff observations about a particular topic.  When someone reads all this rambling mess one day, they are going to think I was clinically insane probably, but I am also hoping others will see it too - others to whom this is actually directed, those who are sorting through similar thoughts and feelings and trying to rediscover themselves.  It's a big task for sure, but it is beneficial in its own merit though. 

The mid-1990s for me was a time of rethinking myself as far as my Christianity goes, and I began to do so by finally embracing things I had been wanting to do, and beginning in the early 1990s I had a means of doing so.  That year, Ministries Today magazine published an article about a rising new movement called Convergence, and it was what I wanted to be part of.  The movement itself was centered on somehow bringing together what were called "Three Streams" of Christian experience - sacramental/liturgical, Evangelical, and Charismatic.  Many of its early pioneers were people like the late Dr. Robert Webber, who was a professor at Wheaton College in Chicago.  Dr. Webber wrote two important books identified with this movement.  The first was his personal journey, a very well-known text called Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail.  I want to say this was published in 1983, but would have to double-check that.  Webber, who was raised as an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, had begun to question some of the more controversial things about the faith of his heritage, and as he did so he began a study of the early Church and what it held and believed.  At around the same time, a group of workers with the Evangelical organization Campus Crusade for Christ led by one Peter Gillquist, underwent a similar journey - Gillquist later published this process in his book Becoming Orthodox.  While Webber would later find his home in a high-Church Anglican tradition, Gillquist and his colleagues would by 1987 be received into the Antiochian Orthodox Church and many of them would be ordained priests.  A third individual, David Bercot, who had been a former Jehovah's Witness and an attorney in Texas, likewise began a similar journey, and like Webber, he initially became Anglican as well - he published what he learned in a book called Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up?  In time, a host of others - a surprising number from Pentecostal or Charismatic backgrounds - began to make similar journeys, and in the early 1990s the official Convergence Movement was born with the advent of an independent church of Anglican heritage called the Charismatic Episcopal Church, which elected as its Patriarch/Archbishop a former nondenominational Charismatic minister in California named Randall Adler.  From this, and through the course of the 1990s, other Convergence bodies formed, including the Charismatic Orthodox Church, the Evangelical Episcopal Church, and others.  I too was part of this movement at that time, as I found people of common conviction that I could relate to, and for many years I sought to actually get credentials as a priest in one of these groups but it never happened for some weird reason.  Many Convergence people though - myself included - later found themselves not so much in independent congregations, but they eventually "came home" to either the Roman Catholic Church (as I did) or to the Orthodox Church (following Peter Gillquist's group).  And, in time, Convergence was a stepping-stone to getting back to where we were supposed to be so it was a tool God used.  In my case though, I had a variety of other influences then as well.

There are two important influences along my own journey I wish to talk about.  The one was the late Greek Orthodox priest Fr. Eusebius Stephanou.  In the early 1990s, I established regular contact with Fr. Eusebius and his right-hand man at his Orthodox retreat center in northern Florida, Symeon MacKnight. Fr. Eusebius was perhaps one of the few voices for Charismatic Renewal in the Orthodox Church, as the Charismatic movement by and large was seen as "too western" and thus rejected by most Orthodox hierarchs.  While Fr. Eusebius created some controversy, for the most part his teachings never waivered significantly from Orthodox tradition, and I learned much from him.  I still consider one of his last books, Sacramentalized but Not Evangelized, as an important and influential text.  A second movement that impacted me was a pre-Pentecostal movement called Irvingism, or the Catholic Apostolic Church movement.  Beginning in the 1830s, this movement was a fully sacramental/liturgical group that also emphasized eschatology and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including tongues.  It is considered an important precursor to the Pentecostal movement, and its uniqueness is what drew me.  The largest denomination in this movement, the New Apostolic Church, has a membership today in the millions, but it is a lot more "low-church" than the CAC from which it came.  Thanks to a priest of a somewhat restored CAC group in Germany, Rev. Harald Scheffler, I learned a lot about this movement, and again Harald was encouraging me to be ordained in it.   I am still good friends with Harald today, as he has a small group he still leads, but now that I have decided to be Catholic, ordination is not a thing anymore although I still do hold some of the original convictions that I share with this movement.  All of this together - not to mention my constant interest in Syriac/Assyrian, Maronite, Coptic, and Armenian Christian traditions - is what led me on my journey in this direction.  Interest in those movements did not stop when I was received into the Catholic Church on Easter 2000, but rather I found ways to make them part of my own Catholic experience.  This story bears more examination of its own, but by now you get the idea of what led me to be Catholic. 

In officially coming into communion with Rome, I had a lot to sort out, but thankfully I was able to do so.  My eschatology was refined better, thanks in part to my dear friend Desmond Birch's excellent resource Trial, Tribulation and Triumph as well as the Hebrew Catholic Movement, in particular Fr. Elias Friedman's seminal book Jewish Identity.  I also found out that it was not wrong to embrace Biblical Creationism too, as thankfully a group of Catholic Creationists, the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation led by Hugh Owen and based in Virginia, proved to be a valuable resource as well. Again, it took learning how things fit together, as well as finding resources, to reconcile my former identity as a Pentecostal with my newfound Catholic faith.  And, lest one doubts, I did have the usual struggles with things such as Mariology, purgatory, and other particulars of the Catholic faith that other converts struggle with, but in time as I learned more thanks to good people as well as a well-grounded orthodox Catholic education at Franciscan University of Steubenville, I not only came to terms with those, but I enthusiastically embraced those doctrines once I fully understood them, and they revolutionized my faith. The journey to being Catholic was not always easy - and there is much more to say about it for sure - but it was worth it, every RCIA class, every moment I sought to research doctrines I struggled with, etc. I found home in the Church, and thanks be to God for leading me here. 

There are many more things to tell, so we will continue this discussion in the next installment.  Thank you. 

Thinking Back on my Spiritual Odyssey Part 3

 So far in this journey, we have talked about symbolism, worship music, and other things.  Now it is time to try to tie this all together somehow, and we will see how many more parts to the story can do just that. 

My 40 years of faith journey has been, well, interesting.  Most of what I am talking about in the past two parts of this story took place in roughly the first 15 years.  As I settled into my 30s, I began to get somewhat comfortable in my spirituality.  At that point, I had been received into the Catholic Church, and a large percentage of my earlier zeal had more or less morphed into something else - contentment and a sort of religious routine.  But, over the years I have often had times where I missed the earlier zeal of my youth, and it seemed that despite ways to recapture it, often it was just something that was a brain fart and it didn't go beyond that.  Oh, I still found things to occupy my spiritual curiosity though.  In the late 2000s, I went on a sort of crusade against some new disturbing trends like the "Emerging Church" movement and this whole Purpose-Driven Life stuff that became vogue during those years - Rick Warren was considered to be the most influential Evangelical Protestant, and he was talking about essentially "remaking" church in his own image, and I found some of what he was doing to be iconoclastic and frankly disturbing.  While it really had no bearing on my newfound Catholic faith in all honesty, I took a strong interest in it because on the rare occasion I visited an Evangelical church of some sort, it was like landing on an alien planet - gone was the Evangelicalism of the 1980s and 1990s, and it was replaced with glorified rock bands, dank and dark sanctuaries, and ministers giving self-esteem lectures rather than discipling their people.  Let me give some background into this as it did evolve over several decades.

The Purpose-Driven/Emerging Church movement had roots that extended back to the late 1980s and early 1990s "Seeker-Friendly" movement.   The main architect of this at the time was a megachurch pastor in Chicago named Bill Hybels, and it also had a more radical expression in the work of James Rutz, an Evangelical author who in the early 1990s wrote a screed of iconoclasm called The Open Church.  Originally curious, I had bought a copy of this book as a young Pentecostal minister, as at the time I thought maybe it would be something similar to Bill Hamon's book The Eternal Church, which in reality was a revolutionary book to me as in my early days as a young Christian I had gotten somewhat involved with Hamon's movement called Christian International, or CI.  CI was a new type of Charismatic group that began teaching about the restoration of prophets and apostles, and although at times they tended to get a little controversial, I found what they said to be intriguing.  I am going to talk more about that shortly, but getting back to the original discussion, James Rutz and Bill Hamon were as different as night from day.  The thesis of Rutz was that the Church had to be utterly destroyed and rebuilt in an image he envisioned of the first-century Church, which in all honesty was very wrong.  Let's talk about that a minute.

James Rutz was into destroying the identity of Christianity to reshape it in his own image, and this was problematic.  For one thing, and as I would learn more once I finally became Catholic, his view of the ancient Church was somewhat skewered.  He wanted a "church" that only met in houses, with no clergy, no sacraments, and not even any discipleship of any type.  He did not openly say that in that abomination of a book he wrote, but he didn't have to - he was a radical.  His version of Christianity was like Quakerism on steroids, and it was not even identifiable as a church.  While Rutz wrote this in the early 1990s, and it thankfully was largely dismissed then (nowadays, people have forgotten him in all honesty, and the response from many of my Evangelical friends when I bring his name up is "James who??).  But, in the late 1990s, a more slickly packaged version of the same thing hit the market, that being Southern Baptist pastor Rick Warren's book The Purpose Driven Church.  Although in about 25 years Warren too would only be a historical footnote, his book caused something, a paradigm shift in how Evangelicals "did church," including throwing out the organ and piano, replacing it with a bad rock band, and then also cutting out the so-called "judgemental" aspects of the Bible because they might "offend" someone.  Rick Warren's approach was essentially bringing a Hillary Clintonesque version of political correctness into the sacred space.  Some Catholics were affected by this, but thankfully it never gained any significant ground in the Catholic Church except for maybe a few suspect rogue Jesuits who were theologically liberal anyway. Unfortunately, from Warren things would go downhill, as then people such as Rob Bell, Doug Padgett, Brian McLaren, and others would create the "Emerging Church" movement, which caused even more problems because now theological heresy (including stuff like universalism, as evidenced by Bell's book Love Wins) was being openly flaunted.  That would last until around 2015 or so, when most of those guys too became bylines and their work had been accomplished.  Evangelical Protestantism in America was severely weakened by all this, although other factors (the major televangelist scandals in the late 1980s for instance) also played into that too.  But, the damage was done.  One area that this hit hard was the social influence of Evangelicalism.

For many of us who grew up in the 1980s, it was the time when Evangelicals had a wonderful politically-active presence.  There were great cultural warriors such as Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and others who took on such trends as a growing concern with the moral issues in entertainment, abortion, the vocal LGBT movement (which wasn't called that then - it was just "gay rights," but still evil), and strong pro-Israel support.  Evangelicals then were writing books, they were organized, and thanks to the sympathetic support of President Reagan, they achieved a level of influence in culture that they would never have since. While many good Catholics were also part of this, in the 1980s and early 1990s most Catholics were still apolitical and thought the Religious Right was their enemy - they feared Evangelicals trying to convert them, and they had a more nuanced approach to social issues then.  Thankfully, 30 years later that would change as Catholics began to find their voice. With the clergy sex scandals of the early 2000s taking a toll on the Catholic Church, many Catholics began to address serious issues and by the end of that decade, the pro-life movement was largely made up of orthodox Catholics rather than Evangelicals - the latter had essentially gone "squish," as many of the old stalwarts and cultural warriors of the Evangelical movement were dying off, and the Rick Warrens and Rob Bells were taking them over too fast.  The lack of moorings in their religious practice led to many Evangelicals also becoming compromised on social issues, to the point that soon a new term was floating - "Evangelical Left."  The Presidency of Obama further weakened Evangelicals, and in their place a number of orthodox Catholics stepped up, and the new face of opposition to secularism was not Jerry Falwell, but rather people like Cardinal Burke, Fr. Frank Pavone, and others who took a Biblical stand for truth.  While there are still liberal holdouts in the Church - unfortunately the late Pope Francis was one - it shows nonetheless that it is Catholics who are now on the front lines of the culture wars, and many Evangelicals now have shrank back to their pods and now are content to sit in their cavernous dark megachurches sipping sanctified knockoffs of Starbucks while being slowly deafened by rock bands playing "worship music."  That little history lesson brings me back to my story now.

I became a Christian at the age of 16 in 1986, and as I went off to college at a small Baptist school in Graceville, FL, a couple of years later, I began to take my faith very seriously.  In the beginning I started off being more "mainstream" in my faith - conservative theologically but somewhat liberal politically, although at that time I was not sure what that meant.  To me then, being "liberal" just meant you were inspired by Martin Luther King and you didn't want a bunch of rich oligarchs pushing a selfish brand of capitalism on you. It was the Cold War era then still (although at the tail-end of it) and most of us were still anti-Communist - we knew the stark contrast between the free West and the oppressive Soviet Bloc then, and we were also the generation that saw the Berlin Wall come down as well as a number of courageous Chinese students standing against Communist tyranny in Tianmen Square.  Being "liberal" to me then did not mean being anti-American or pro-communist at all - it meant enjoying good music, being well-read, and not judging people based on race or economic status.  To me, those were naturally Christian values, so it was not too contradictory at all to hold to those and a conservative theological position.  As I was to find out later though, I was perhaps a true conservative then, and I was never part of the ideological Left - I was just a decent person who wanted a fair society and it had no bearing on a person what their skin color was.  I also considered myself more "progressive" then because I loved classic jazz and good books, and my own lower-income background made me a sort of crusader for the "common man."  All of that was what I defined as "liberal" then but in reality it was perhaps the best of conservatism. And to be honest, I found out that many of the so-called "liberal" values I had then were actually opposed by actual ideological Leftists, and that was a revelation. So, I was "right" from the beginning more or less!

My early development as a new Christian was an exercise in making a lot of things fit together that often I was told by some didn't fit - for instance, could a devout Christian listen to Frank Sinatra? And, later, how does a Christian recognize Israel's right to exist while at the same time having a level of solidarity with Christian minorities in the Middle East, many of whom I was later to find out were not exactly fond of Israel?  For a long time in my early years as a Christian, I sort of put my musical interests - collecting vintage big band recordings - on hold as I threw myself into my newfound faith.  I was teaching a Sunday School class at age 16, serving on the local church council at age 17, and preaching in churches by age 19.  I also got involved in denominational leadership too, from attending Baptist (and later Foursquare) conventions in my late teens and early 20s, to later serving as a lay Eucharistic Minister in both the Anglican and later Catholic traditions.  I was a young man with a lot of big ideas then - I wanted to somehow synthesize all I was learning into a Bible study series, and it was frustrating because at that time it was pre-internet and I had limited access to technology.  It was considered a huge deal in those days to just have a typewriter in all honesty, and I did have one - first it was an old manual typewriter that stuck on keys, but later I got myself an electric typewriter and was able to type out a bunch of old sermon notes and other things.  It wasn't until 1998 that I discovered the internet, and we would not get a personal home computer until 2001.  But, all that led to some other things in my journey.

The new exposure to technology opened up a lot of doors for me between the years of 2000 and 2011, and it was during that time I began to solidify some ideas into something more tangible.  Although I had started keeping a personal written journal regularly in 1996, and later I began to write down my life story, it was the internet that changed a lot.  In my first 10 years of having an actual home computer, I began to do something new - I discovered both social media and blogging, and for the first time I could get my ideas out to a wider audience.  My first exposure to social media was a site called Bebo in 2006, which was a less-sophisticated version of MySpace then.  Within a year or two, a new platform was rolled out called Facebook, and I got invited by a friend to be on there in 2008.  My early attempts at writing entailed "story" posts on Facebook, and I still have a collection of those that spanned two years until I found out I could have my own blogging platform that I discovered in 2010.  Blogging was revolutionary for me, in that I was able to take ideas I had written in journals and typed pages of stuff over many years and turn them into nice-looking posts, and as I began to do that, some of my earliest blog posts were transcripts of old sermons and Bible studies I had done over the years, and they are still available online even today.  Even as I write this now, my adaption of technology continues to evolve as I have in recent years also began to publish my own books (I have three now) and I feel like I am in a place I only dreamed about just 30 years ago.  Yet, in all that something is still missing, and I wanted to address that now.

Having better resources has indeed helped me tremendously, but there are days I wish I had that old zeal I had years ago back, and could marry it to this type of technology.  However, although I am more committed to my personal faith than I have ever been, the actual practice of my faith is sort of stagnant now.  Being Catholic now is something I wouldn't change for anything, but I miss things - I miss the joy of preaching for instance, as well as being in some leadership capacity in a church.  One of the reasons I am writing this now is to see if somehow I can recover some of that, and I am doing so by going back into my past to see what once was there. Although in some aspects I am exercising some of my old passions by being able to teach full-time at a Catholic school, I cannot shake that whole "fish out of water" feeling I have.  And, although I have a very active faith, I don't attend Mass as often as I would like, and I am not as involved in parish work as I would love to be either.  Much of my old religious fervor has also diminished - my faith will never change, but I do miss some of the enthusiasm I had as a young Christian.  Is it realistic or even possible to recover that, or is this just a means of growth or something?  There are many questions to be addressed, and I want to continue this series some more to maybe uncover some things.  And, in the process, maybe I can encourage others as well who are in a similar place in life.  

This discussion is multi-faceted and will continue until I get to the place I want to be at, so I will see you in the next installment of this series. 

Thinking Back on My Spiritual Odyssey Part 2

 I used the first part of this little series to explain some of the differences between how modern Charismatics and Pentecostals view "worship" vs. what worship truly is, and my take on it has a lot to do with how I picture God.  God to me is two things I noted - a sovereign King but also a close friend.  Depending on the context, my own religious faith gravitates to one or the other of these.  In corporate worship, such as attending Mass, I see Christ the King.  In my private prayers for the most part, I see Christ my dear friend.  The second aspect I will focus on now, as it has some complexities.

As with any relationship, a friendship with Jesus is wrought with a diverse spectrum of experiences.  There were times, when at my lowest, I saw him as the friend who embraced and comforted me.  At other times, I gave him tongue-lashings for things I perceived as unjust on his part (I found out later they really weren't as unjust in reality though as they were in my own mind), only to begrudgingly feel bad about it later and apologize, because like any best friend you don't ever truly want to lose them.  And, despite how at times I have been really nasty in my exchanges with God, one of the things I also realized is that God transcends me and every other fallible human being on earth, and he sees past my pettiness.  That is something I am in all honesty grateful for.  I have also done my share of putting out fleeces, bargaining, issuing ultimatums, and other things as a sort of holdover from my Pentecostal past, and thankfully God has more wisdom than I do on some things because usually in retrospect I see why it didn't necessarily go the way I wanted it to, and that may in many cases be a good thing.  Jesus is a true friend in that he lovingly endures my lack of patience, my volatile temper, and other limitations I have, and in that regard he is better than any earthly friend, as many times our fellow human beings have limits and we can stretch them with each other. That too has shaped who I am as a Christian and person of faith, because it makes me take a more realistic approach to my own faith, and thank God for his supernatural grace at times!  In my 55 years on this earth, the main thing I have realized is that I have not arrived at perfection yet, and may never completely be there in this life - but, grace continues to work and grow me, and as long as we let that grace work in us, our faith will be strong even when we are not.  That is a radical take from a lot of things I have seen in both my former Protestant background and in my current Catholic identity - there are Protestants and Catholics alike who think they have to "put on a happy face" and do an act of sanctimonious overkill to prove ourselves, but God is, as I said earlier, telling us to "cut the crap."  The first step to allowing grace to work and to have a genuine faith is to be real - be honest with who you are, and don't worry about if you fall short, because none of us have achieved the pinnacle of perfection yet.  The most encouraging experience I have had with my 11th-grade students I taught last year was a note one of them gave me basically saying "thank you for being real."  An educator, pastor, or any other leader cannot receive a better compliment than that - being real.  Being real with ourselves, with God, and with each other - this will be the root of true worship also.  Which now leads to my next point in regard to that. 

Anyone who knows me is aware that I am not really an emotionally expressive person - I am somewhat introverted, and tend to approach things with a quiet caution, especially when dealing with new people. Part of that is just being a normal man - men are taught to control our emotions, although at times I think that can be taken too far as well.  We are still human beings, and there are things that will affect us and therefore on occasion a man is definitely allowed to shed tears in grief or sorrow, and no man should be diminished for doing that. My introverted, reserved demeanor also extends to how I worship in the Church.  As a Catholic, this is not really a huge issue as reverence and a certain amount of respect for God's house is mandated.  However, when I was a Pentecostal it presented a problem.  In my Pentecostal days as many of you recall, I attended a Foursquare Gospel church in Dothan, AL, and this particular church was, well, a bit expressive.  It seems at some point in their past, that particular church had some sort of revival meetings that impacted the pastor, and he was seeking to re-create that all the time.  So, if you were not a person who waved your hands in the air, yelled like a banshee when "the Spirit moved," or danced like a fool in church services, you were seen as odd, rebellious, and yes, even demon-possessed. I would come to find out later that this particular church was actually a glaring exception rather than the rule in many Pentecostal traditions, and it definitely was not a Kathryn Kuhlman crusade - I was the type of Pentecostal then who was drawn more to a Kathryn Kuhlman kind of worship and faith, and not the one this pastor was trying to impose on his flock.  Even later, I learned that one of the oldest Pentecostal denominations in existence - the Apostolic Faith Church in Portland, OR, which had a direct connection to Azuza Street - was a light-year measurement in distance away from that crazy Foursquare group in Alabama.  Turns out that many of the congregations in the Apostolic Faith movement had full orchestras and they also had a more Scriptural take on things like tongues - they taught that tongues were in a known language unknown to the speaker, and their purpose was more evangelical than self-edifying.  While still supernatural in origin, this particular interpretation of the gift of tongues makes more sense than the incoherent babbling many do in your typical hyper-Pentecostal groups like that one in Alabama.  Looking back on it now, I am starting to wonder if perhaps I should have looked at the Apostolic Faith denomination rather than the Foursquare group I became part of, but then again, my venture into Foursquare was also based on my personal fanship of their most prominent minister at the time, Dr. Jack Hayford who pastored Church on the Way in Van Nuys, CA.  Hayford was a different type of Pentecostal from the pastor I had too, as he was more like what I wanted to be if I ever was a minister - he was well-educated, and he also had those church services then which were personally very attractive to me as they were what I imagined a good Pentecostal church to be.  In all honesty then, despite Dr. Hayford being Foursquare, the local Assembly of God church in Graceville at the time had more in common with Hayford's model than did the more hickish Foursquare church in Alabama that was the same denomination. In retrospect, I probably should have stayed with that Assemblies of God church and things would have been much different.  In other words, I had probably more of an old-fashioned Wesleyan-flavored Pentecostalism than many people I knew, and even more so, I was perhaps more of an Irvingite than anything because I was even at that time evolving a very sacramental understanding of my faith, which for me was a natural outgrowth of the supernatural aspect of the Pentecostal tradition I was part of.  In assessing alternate scenarios though, any way I look at it I would have ended up Catholic eventually because I was on the course for that even in the earliest stages of my Christian walk. 

My second experience in a Foursquare church that came a couple of years later was not a huge improvement.  I went from an authoritarian, abusive, and cultish pastor to one who was essentially spineless and somewhat not sure of what he wanted.  That particular congregation was a relatively new one that initially met in the pastor's house before later moving to a women's club building in the community in Florida where it was located.  As controlling and abusive as the Alabama group was, this Florida group was somewhat disorganized and chaos seemed to be the order of the day for them.  The pastor was putting people into leadership who led questionable lifestyles, including a young Black man who claimed to be Christian but he was still getting his unwed girlfriend pregnant every couple of years and he was possibly involved in some gang-related activity.  He could talk the right talk - yes, he was one of those, relying on all the good religious lingo and all - but something about him just didn't set right either.  The pastor's wife then was into film and movies, and she was at times treating the church services like a screenplay, which was odd. The breaking point for me with this group was the rather weird irreverence they treated Palm Sunday one year - out of protest I attended Palm Sunday services at a Methodist church near the house, and had a much more edifying experience. In time, both this and the Alabama church closed their doors, and the cultish pastor in Alabama ended up dying with Alzheimer's disease (something he had decried as a "demon" at one time) while the Florida pastor and his wife ended up divorced.  In later years, the pastor's ex-wife matured though, which I am happy to say, and today she is a vibrant woman of faith who is doing some good work in counseling.  I am also still close to her too, and a lot of that old garbage from 30 years ago is now forgiven and forgotten.  As a matter of fact, she has been a wonderful source of prayer support in the past couple of years when I faced challenges. So, for that saga it was a good ending.

I know a lot of this has been rehashed from previous accounts, but I wanted to delve into it a little more as watching a little bit of the old Kathryn Kuhlman crusade music got my wheels turning.  In the entire spectrum of my own faith journey, I don't totally reject my Pentecostal roots - they are a part of me, and perhaps God allowed that to help me grow some.  As I continue these conversations, I am going to talk more about how that made me more of a faithful Catholic, even though it is somewhat paradoxical - I lean very much towards a more traditional/conservative form of Catholic faith now, although I am not what you would call a strict traditionalist by any means.  For instance, I am not exclusively Tridentine Mass (although I think the old Mass is beautiful and believe Catholics should be able to celebrate it), nor am I against Vatican II as much either.  On the latter, much of the controversy about Vatican II I have found does not center around the documents or the council itself, but rather how some more liberal factions of the Church applied it - they took some bad liberties with some of the Vatican II reforms that I don't believe reflect the true spirit of the documents or the Council, and thus it caused some serious problems.  And, as a Catholic, I also do not eschew or reject my pre-Catholic past - I knew I was a Christian before I came home to the Church, and although it was an incomplete Christianity, it was still real and I know I was serving God and Jesus - the Church just made that faith more complete.  And, I still have many of my old friends who are not Catholic - I know Baptists, Pentecostals, Holiness people, Methodists, Lutherans, and Anglicans - who love God and do believe in Jesus as the only way to salvation, and that makes them fully Christian in my book although their faith lacks the dimension that the Catholic Church could provide them.  A hunger does exist among many of these people too, as they are getting the drawing to things such as symbolism as well as a deeper understanding of things like the Eucharist, and you see it in their teachings.  One example is my distant relative and well-known Pentecostal evangelist Perry Stone.  Perry is by no means Catholic, but God is working in him, and he in recent years has been teaching about a more sacramental understanding of the Lord's Supper, although he hasn't gotten the full picture of that yet.  Give him time though, because if he is open God can use that to help him grow too, just like he has done with so many of us.  So, while I consider myself a traditionalist and definitely conservative in the form of Catholicism I embrace, I also leave some room for things that many Trads don't.  However, in time many younger Trads in particular will mature, and as they grow in their faith as well, they will learn to appreciate more things too. 

I still don't feel like I got everything out on the table with this discussion that I wanted to, so it looks like a Part 3 may be in order next time.  Thank you, and will see you then. 

Thinking Back on My Spiritual Odyssey Part 1

 It is really weird to try to express this in words, as it is more about my general mindset and how I choose to serve God in my Christian walk.  Anyone who knows me will attest I do things a bit differently - I have been scoffed at and hated by some, and admired by others, but many cannot figure me out.  I kind of like it like that in all honesty.  What brought this to mind was the other day when I was contemplating rebuilding a lost music collection, which is in four compartments - one is my vintage big band/jazz collection, second is a small classical collection of composers and works I like (I lean heavily toward 20th-century composers such as Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky), a third is my ethnic music collection (Assyrian and Armenian music particularly), and the fourth category is my religious/sacred collection.  The fourth is surprisingly diverse, as it contained many things - liturgical music from all Church traditions, vintage Southern Gospel and Black Gospel, and more traditional hymns but specifically things that reflected my own spiritual journey.  One of the items in my original collection was music that used to be part of the late Charismatic evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman's crusades - it was tasteful, featuring traditional piano and organ as well as an orchestra and large choir.  One of the choruses that she often used in her crusades was a composition by Eugene L. Clark entitled "Nothing is Impossible," and it was also featured in Benny Hinn's crusades for many years as he often tried to imitate Kathryn Kuhlman's style being he thought he was somehow her son by God's providential miracle.  The words of it go something like this:

   Nothing is impossible when you put your trust in God

   Nothing is impossible when you're trusting in his Word

   Hearken to the voice of God to thee,

   "Is there anything too hard for me?"

  Then put your trust in God alone, and rest upon his Word,

  For everything, O everything, yes everything is possible with God!

This was an older song that was birthed out of the Charismatic Renewal movement and was composed by Clark in 1966.  While largely forgotten today, the song actually has a good message.  For its time, it was considered "contemporary," but more so in the mold of other Christian hymnodists who wrote similar work like John W. Peterson and Bill Gaither.  It has frankly become one of my personal favorite choruses, both for its simple Biblical message as well as for its melody.  At both Kuhlman's and Hinn's crusades, this song was often the opening chorus to the massive crusades back in the day, and it was done with full orchestration and a mass choir.  While I find Benny Hinn's theology a bit suspect, I have to concede that the music in his old crusades was actually well-done, and the music at his crusades was never truly the issue.  In a 1993 crusade at the Mabee Center at ORU's campus in Tulsa, this song was used, with the mass crusade choir directed by Jim Cernero, and the one thing that always gets me in that recording is the end chorus - there is a slight pause in which the chord of the organ is heard, and it heightens the experience.  It's a detail that was probably lacking even at the time of the actual crusade, but I noticed it quickly.  You see, things like those little details make a big difference in the way one focuses on worship of God, and it is as if the Holy Spirit himself directs either the composer or arranger to include those little things as a reminder of why we are where we are and what we are supposed to be doing.  I notice it even at the Dominican parish in Baltimore I attend now - usually between the Communion hymn and the beautiful Salve Regina that follows it, there is a beautiful organ interlude that sort of draws the person to God and the Spirit's presence, and that is more powerful than many may realize.  And this is not exclusive to the music of the Church either - one of the things that made the late legend Louis Prima's live shows so dynamic was that he employed the same technique to his program on stage - the energy level is kept going, and it aids in making the audience experience more riveting.  Things like this separate the performance from the experience of the event, and it is one way God has gifted talented people with the ability to bring a new level of aesthetic quality to both actual worship as well as just the enjoyment of a stellar concert.  My sensitivities in this regard shape how I actually worship God in the Mass, or even in my old days in Pentecostal revivals and church services.  Many people don't understand this, but it does have a component I will get into shortly.

Also in my old Christian music collection was one album in the Maranatha Music series that I count as one of my favorites of all time.  First though, a little history on Maranatha.  Maranatha grew out of the ministry of Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel in the 1970s, and was the birth of what is known as the "worship chorus" that would be used in so many Pentecostal and Charismatic churches almost to the exclusion of traditional hymnody.  It was a creation of the "Jesus People" generation of American Evangelicalism, and to be honest it was not really a bad thing at all - many of the enthusiastic young converts who created the choruses of the Maranatha catalog used actual Scripture as the lyrics and just composed a melody around it - a number of the early ones came in particular from the Psalms in Scripture, and some have actually become so commonplace that a variety of churches from high-Church Anglicans to rural Holiness-Pentecostal chapels use them.  One of these that got my attention early on was taken from Psalm 32:7, and its title comes directly from that - "You Are My Hiding Place."  The music that surrounds these lyrics pulled directly from the Psalms is actually very beautiful, and in its instrumental version it is particularly comforting and also does touch the soul in a profound way.  I am not exactly sure when the exact year was when this was released and began to be used in churches, but I am guessing by its sound it was early to mid 1970s.  Why this is significant will be the next part of my discussion.

I have never been a big fan of "praise choruses" being used in churches, and in recent years it seems as if Evangelicalism in general has been inundated with some bad ones - some don't even have real lyrics now, and are just repetitive grunts like "oh, oh, oh, oh - heaven!"  That, and the loud, cacophonic rock music setting many are performed in, frankly don't do a thing for me - I don't feel God's presence with that stuff, as it seems the gut-shaking electronic/artificial rhythms and repetitive childish lyrics are invoking more of a Pavlovian response than they are actual worship.  I also have a problem with equally bad music from some smaller Pentecostal churches, where bad singing and equally bad amateur musicianship seem to invoke the same Pavlovian response, all in the name of "worship" of course.  This is particularly true in the past 30 years or so, where weird stuff masquerading as "worship" has invaded so many churches.  The iconoclastic protest against "tradition" has in turn created its own sterile "tradition of men" that makes me feel like I am on a different planet than the Protestant churches I was part of years ago.  In a small struggling church, one can forgive an off-key singer or an amateur piano player who at least try to make a "joyful noise unto the Lord," but the bigger megachurches as well as the thousands of congregations that try to ape them throughout the country with professional stage shows and rock bands are beyond my personal comprehension.  There is no reverence, no sense of the sacred, and it is reflected often in the spiritual lives of people who attend such churches.  And, with COVID-19, it has made this more of a problem because in many "multi-campus" megachurches often the "pastor" is a video screen.  Church nowadays feels more like the mediocre pop concert rather than the house of the Lord, and it is a big factor in why I am no longer an Evangelical Protestant myself.  Despite the pitiful descent of so-called "worship music," there are earlier choruses that were actually quite edifying and beautiful, and many of them were recorded from Maranatha's record label.  "You are My Hiding Place" is the most profound of those to me, but there are others too.  The thing is however, choruses have their place when you look at it from the standpoint of liturgical theology, and frankly they are not designed for inclusion in the liturgy.  Now, for non-liturgical events such as parish missions and such, they work fine though, and no one would object to them in that capacity.  This forms the foundation as to why my faith life is different and it also has a lot to do with how I relate to God.

In my personal spirituality and faith, God to me is represented by two things.  First, he is King, and the liturgy (Mass) is a divine picture of the Kingship of Christ.  In that regard, I worship Christ with a fealty and reverence that says "I am your servant" and as a servant, I am also a warrior for truth to defend what Jesus gave us.  Second, Christ is like a best friend to me - many of my own prayers are extemporaneous conversations with the One who knows me best, and I talk to God often as if he is having morning coffee with me and it is deeply edifying.  Of course, I do more formal traditional prayers such as a Rosary everyday too, and I say the St. Michael Prayer both morning and before I go to sleep at night.  Any rate, a chorus like "Hiding Place" is what reflects with that dimension of my personal faith.  I owe that second dimension of my faith to a guy I knew years ago named Norman Tenney, who served as an associate pastor at a small Baptist mission in Graceville, FL.  Norman was a jolly, somewhat eccentric guy but he had a sincerity that drew people to him, and he was a good friend to me for years.  He taught me the practice of extemporaneous "conversational prayer," and it was one of the most liberating things I had ever come across.  We often get into this weird delusion that in order to talk to God we have to use a pious serious voice and say "Thee," "Thou," or Thine" repeatedly as well as putting an "-est" at the end of every verb and an "a-" at the front.  To be honest, the pious act always rubbed me wrong because in all honesty God knows us already better than we do ourselves, and when a person launches into one of those sanctimonious prayers peppered with Elizabethan English, I picture God rolling his eyes and saying "cut the crap, will ya?"  That may offend some religious scruples of those reading this, but think about it - God does put up with a lot of pretentious, sanctimonious crap from us, and in all honesty does that even make our prayers heard better?  According to Scripture itself, it doesn't - Scripture talks about contrition, honesty, and the state of the heart, and often our tongues and brains don't reflect what is truly in our hearts, and we don't fool God with that nonsense.  The same is true with corporate worship in our churches - we don't have to repeat a childish mantra over and over as a "worship chorus" and jump up and down waving our hands to impress God - he doesn't impress easily in all honesty, because he is the Creator of the universe we live in and nothing we can do will impress him, especially if it is done in the wrong spirit.  God is not looking to be impressed - he is looking to be adored and worshipped, and in a way that is honest and compatible with the person he created us to be.  Therefore, some people will worship quietly, while others may raise their hands and shout, but God is looking at the heart, and often the so-called "shouters" are performing and not worshipping.  Any type of music in a church that encourages performance over worship is not great, and for a performance a person would get more satisfaction at a concert instead.  And, the liturgy in particular is not about performance - at its center is Christ, the object and focus of our worship, and the music and everything else should point toward that.  AND, that is a jab against some liberal Catholics who try to use the Mass as a "social justice" platform instead of the worship of Christ - they are as bad as the megachurches in that case in all honesty.  It is time we get back to what matters. 

There is much more I can say on this, but we will pick this up next time as I see the potential for a series here.  Thanks for allowing me to share, and will see you next time. 

Right to Live Life - Eradicating HOAs

 Over the past couple of months or so, I have been watching some videos about the notorious "HOA Karens."  While Karen may not be the actual person's name, the moniker as understood in modern jargon fits - a nasty middle-aged woman who wants control, micromanagement, and has a superiority complex against everyone different from her.  The "Karens" though are a bad and rotten fruit of a deeper problem with a more nefarious root, and that is what I wanted to talk about today.

In my thinking - as odd as it seems - if you pay your hard-earned money to invest in a home you will live in, then you should have rights to live how you please.  Obviously, there are some common-sense things to do, such as not trashing up your place with cars on cinder blocks in your front yard, or manufacturing controlled substances in your garden shed in the back yard, or playing loud, noisy sounds (music and otherwise) that create a disturbance for your neighbors.  That is all about just basic courtesy and respect, and a responsible homeowner doesn't do any of that anyway. So, what is the deal then with HOAs, especially those controlled by the stereotypical "Karens?"   Let's talk about that some.

In an episode of Duck Dynasty I watched a few years back, Jase Robertson had some issues with his local HOA - he wanted to keep chickens in his yard, as well as burning lawn clippings and dead leaves.  He was emphatically told "no" by the local HOA, and he protested.  His humorous monologue he delivered at the meeting in the HOA president's garage was perhaps one of the most hilarious things I have heard - "We are given the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and chickens make me happy!"  He then extolled the virtues of avian husbandry by noting that chickens get rid of nasty bugs that would otherwise be pests, they naturally fertilize the lawn, and when they outlive their usefulness, you can butcher them and put them in the pot.  In all honesty, Jase's argument was an example of good old-fashioned redneck genius, and he was technically right on all of his points.  However, while I would personally question having a flock of chickens in my neighbor's yard next door, there are honestly far worse offenses in the world than that.  This humorous segment of a hit TV show illustrates the hubris with which many of us view HOAs, and now I want to talk about that for a while.

An HOA (homeowner's association) is in principle an elected body of fellow homeowners in a given community who oversee the security and integrity of the community.  If an HOA actually does what it is supposed to do, it just makes sure the community is safe, that municipal codes are observed, and it also should encourage community cohesiveness in the form of activities and other functions.  The HOA then has the job of representing and advocating for the homeowners who are part of it, and if it did that, many people would not have issues with them.  However, the horror stories of HOA abuse and overreach have become the stuff of urban legends, and there are no less than a dozen YouTube channels about the notorious "HOA Karens," and the protagonists targeted by them.  The end of the story usually culminates in the HOA getting put in its place by a homeowner who has had enough of being abused simply for living life in their own house, and the conclusions of these stories range from humorous (such as wiring the "HOA Karen's" house to loudly play polka music when they open their refrigerator door) to macabre (one story had a "Karen" getting justice by becoming a 12-foot gator's lunch), but all of them contain the same message - HOA overreach is challenged, and the victims are vindicated in some fashion.  Therefore, while an HOA in principle is perhaps not a bad idea, its abuses and overreach are problematic and make it debatable as to whether they are really needed or not.  Let's talk about examples of HOA overreach and abuse.

Many HOAs tend to be controlled by micromanaging and totalitarian shrews (Karens) who get obsessed with "property values" and "community aesthetic," and instead of just enforcing common-sense measures, these boards resort to things such as penalizing people for a slight difference in the shade of paint on a mailbox, hanging a wet rug on a porch to dry, or some other stupidity such as the wrong color of flowers.  It seems like if a person breathes in their own house, they risk being fined or penalized for it. Many of those type of HOAs are more restrictive than Kim Jung Un in North Korea, as HOA tyrants tend to set up their own little kingdoms wanting control of every aspect of everyone's lives.  In the stories on the videos, often this totalitarian micromanagement conceals more dark secrets, as the "Karen" often is embezzling funds or doing something else criminal.  The thing about the worship of control is this - often it means the person who is possessed by that mania wants that control at any cost, and they don't care if they manipulate law or do illegal actions. This is also similarly true of politicians who seek after power for themselves instead of being a servant to their constituents.  And, an HOA is like a festering blister where such germs flourish.  And this is why I think the laws should be changed to eradicate the threat.

I truly believe that the HOA system as it exists needs to be overhauled and even made illegal.  I propose that the replacement for this be voluntary resident's groups who really invest in the well-being of the community.  Instead of worrying about the shade of beige on a mailbox, resident/volunteer groups would focus on things such as ensuring the safety of the community as well as finding ways to make the community actually a real community, and in doing so it would also preserve the personal liberties of the homeowners who are part of it.  No micromanaging, no fines or penalties, no overly-complicated rulebooks - those things would be made illegal and no one would be allowed to implement and enforce them. In the past we have talked about dignity of personhood as well as things that violate it - things such as abortion, euthanasia, racism, etc.   In the middle of that also sits overreaching entities such as HOAs or even corporate tyrants in workplaces - these individuals are evil, and there is no good in them because they seek to serve themselves and dehumanize everyone they come into contact with.  This is even true with people they try to impress - they will try to kiss butt with those they think will give them an advantage, but if that doesn't work out for them, they demonize and attempt to subvert the system.  The people who do this can be "Karens" on a community level, or they can be ruthless dictators of nations, billionaire oligarchs, or useless bureaucrats in government.  I am not sure if Dante had an assigned place in hell for such people, but I imagine that if he did it would be in the hottest part due to the damage they inflict.  Violating God-given personhood of another is a gross offense of justice, and it deserves maximum punishment - that is true whether the culprit is an overreaching HOA or a genocidal dictator. 

To conclude my thoughts and circling back to HOAs, I think those entities should be made illegal, and indeed, also restricted.  And, individuals who are willing parts of them need to be fully censured and restricted as well.  When a person invests their hard-earned money and labor into their own home, no one has a right to dictate stupid rules and minutiae to them.  That home is yours, if you paid for it and invested work into it, and you have the absolute right to live in it the way you wish without some outside entity dictating crap to you.  This is also true as far as just living one's life goes - God gave us free will, and the positive side of that is that we have the sovereignty to live our lives as we choose.  We of course respect that right for others too, and in doing so we just use common sense and an awareness of the common good to guide us.  Therefore, enjoy what God has blessed you with, and don't let anyone tell you that you can't!  Thanks again, and will see you next time. 

Striving For Significance

 In the past couple of weeks or so, I have gotten into watching a favorite Christian comedian I have followed since the early 1990s, Mark Lowry.  Many who are Southern Gospel fans are familiar with Mark from the Gaither Homecoming shows, as in the late 1990s and early 2000s Mark and Gaither had established a hilarious comedy routine with Mark tormenting Gaither about his hair, etc., and it was frankly funny!  In an interview I watched later, Gaither mentioned that Mark had a sort of sanctified Don Rickles shtick he used, and he told Mark that if he had to pick on anyone, then Gaither would be his straight man - it was a formula that worked too.  When asked by people if Gaither got offended at Mark's ribbing, Mark replied, "he gives me a raise everytime I come up with something else!"  The close friendship Bill Gaither and Mark Lowry have had over the years is an amazing story in itself, and the joy the comedy they produced has made people laugh for almost 30 years now.  If I had one criticism of Lowry, it would be the Christmas song he wrote called "Mary Did You Know?" which does have some theological problems in all honesty.  But, Lowry is not a theologian, and nor do I think he claims to be, and a song like that should be taken with a grain of salt and it doesn't deter from the fact that Lowry is still a brilliant comedian and his work never ages. 

There are a couple of routines that I really found to be my favorites of Mark's comedy.  The first I will briefly mention, as it is perhaps one of my all-time favorite videos to watch.  In the clip, Gaither is performing a song composed by legendary Statesmen lead singer Jake Hess () entitled "I'm Gonna Keep On Singing."  At the time, both Mark and Hess were part of the Gaither Vocal Band lineup, and it was a winning formula in all honesty.  Bill is treating the song in the video like a live rehearsal, and he is giving the group instructions about singing the parts.  The first part is the first verse, and Gaither instructs Mark at the halfway point in the verse to insert an "OOOOOO," and upon receiving the instructions Gaither kicks off the song while sitting at the piano with his group behind him.  After the first four words, "It's as old as..." Mark with a silly face goes "OOOOO!"  He is reprimanded by Gaither who tells him that this was supposed to be at the middle of the verse, at which Lowry replies,  "I thought that was halfway through."  Toward the last verse of the song, there is a line about "I hear the little sparrow," and that too becomes a highlight - on queue, Guy Penrod, the other singer in the group, gives a warbling whistle - Gaither then continues the song and the whistle comes again, so it is done over.  At that point, Mark lets out a huge squawk, and Gaither is apparently perturbed (it is an act obviously, but it is funny!) and Mark's response is "Boy, that is a big bird that came through here - it almost landed in your nest!"  Every time I watch that, I am literally laughing so hard that I cannot contain myself.  After Gaither accusingly calls out Mark and Mark vehemently denies it, Mark then points an accusing finger at Jake Hess, and says "He did it!  You can be replaced - I can wear that wig!" and then he pulls out a wig that looks like Hess's hairdo and dons it and begins to imitate Hess's singing style, which gets a huge audience response and a good-natured laugh from Hess, who is about as amusing in that he is cracking up laughing during Penrod's sparrow calls.  In all honesty, I could watch that over and over, as it is just hilarious to watch and it is classic comedy at its finest.  While that is perhaps my favorite routine of Mark's and Gaither's, there is another one that got my attention too. 

There was a clip where the Gaither program was taped live in a major city, and it is close to Mark's birthday.  After an amusing monologue about the "joys" of "turning forty," which Mark says sounds like clabbered milk, he then gets off on a speech in which he says the first fifty years of his life were about success, but for the second fifty he is striving for significance - he then launches into an amusing song called "God Help the USA" which is his fictional run for President (this was taped after the 2000 election, so there are jokes about recounts in the song as well as putting Willy Nelson in charge of the IRS - that was brilliant, as at the time Willy was having a few issues of his own with unjust tax laws enacted under Clinton's administration).  While the song was amusing - especially the part about making Gospel music legend Vestal Goodman his running mate - that line "striving for significance" did hit a chord with me, and I wanted to reflect on that a little.  Despite the amusing comedic setting this was uttered in, there is a grain of wisdom in it too, and recently I related better to it myself.  

It has been almost 6 years since I hit my 50th birthday, and in all honesty what came after I turned 50 was perhaps some of the most challenging times of my life.  Barbara and I divorced, I lost both of my parents, I lost my home, I got a doctoral degree, and I started a new career as a teacher as well as moving to Baltimore.  Things have definitely got a little shaken up after I hit mid-century in my life, and even now I am still making a lot of adjustments to everything.  At 55 now, a lot of that dust is starting to settle thankfully, but I am still in the process of trying to make sense of some of it.  In many ways, like Mark Lowry I have achieved a level of success, but I also struggle with significance.  Am I significant enough, and do I really want to be?  Those are challenging questions to which no answer comes easily.  And, can significance be a thing to strive for, or is it just something bestowed once others notice?  There are people God places in our lives that we impact for sure, but for most of our lives we are not even aware we had that impact on them, and in many cases it is only recognized after we die.  It reminds me of the words of Shakespeare I had to memorize in my senior year of high school many moons ago in Julius Caesar when a monologue states "the evil men do lives after them, but the good is oft interred with their bones."  The truth in that is that often people remember more about what was wrong with you than what you accomplished, and in life that is even more so because even our families at times take us for granted and don't really see the hard work and other efforts we make to achieve our goals in life - I actually had relatives that mocked my doctoral degree, criticized the fact I successfully went to college and got a good education, and they even are dismissive with my other work too.  That is why I have finally come to a conclusion about that, and I will add that now.

I have talked about the fact that at times our families can be toxic, and what is really sad is that since I have moved to Baltimore, I have perhaps as many as twenty relatives living within 15 miles of me, yet I never see them, they don't talk to me, and they frankly don't care I even exist - oh, that is unless I can be useful to them.  When I first moved here as a matter of fact and was looking for a place to live, I wanted to reach out to my cousins about possibly subletting a room or something with them, and they just brushed me off and didn't even respond - the old axiom that "blood is thicker than water" is not applicable with relatives like that, because their blood is about as sterile as water when it comes to how they relate to other family members.  I have another cousin who lives back in my hometown who is a notorious gossip also - never hear much out of him either, but for some reason he likes to run his mouth to other family members about juicy details in my life that are none of his business.  I have found that I have little use for these "relatives," because although we may share a family tree, they don't treat me like family and frankly I am probably better off without them. This is why in recent years I have concluded that perhaps it is time to reshape my family legacy, and as mentioned earlier there are a couple of things I won't divulge at this point that are in the formative stages of doing just that.  While I cannot say a lot about that now, I can say that it will be something that writes a new chapter in our family history, and it will be a different chapter that will look radically different in generations to come while still maintaining the better aspects of my roots.  It sometimes becomes necessary to close an old chapter and then pick up the pen to write a new one, and that is what is happening now, with the past five years compelling me to do so in all honesty.  While this is still in the formative stages and I am not at liberty to say a lot about it yet, I can say that when the time comes to reveal things it will be a shock to many, but also it's a beautiful thing that I am happy with too.  Writing a new chapter in one's life is never an easy thing, and there is some shaking up that happens in the process, but the new chapter will be something much better.  And, that is where significance comes in.

So what does all that have to do with striving for significance?  Over the years, I have had things come a little later to me than they do for many people, and for some reason it is perfect timing.  It must be understood also that significance is seeded by success, but success is not something that has a blanket definition - what some view as a failure may be in reality the greatest success to the person whom it is bestowed upon.  Success is not about financial wealth necessarily either, as it more explicitly has to do with getting to the place one has worked toward in life.  In many ways, I can say I have success, although there is always room for improvement and new goals to achieve.  So, being success is not uniform and there are many forms of success even in our individual lives, what happens when we get there?  That is where significance comes in.  Significance is simply something that really stands out, and it marks a distinction between where you are vs. where someone else is.  What is significant to one person may not be for another, and that is why we don't need to try the "keep up with the Joneses" racket with others.  Their significance is not yours, and yours is not theirs.  And neither form of significance is negative - we achieve it for ourselves and can be satisfied to a degree, but we also should celebrate it when others achieve significance.  It is not a competition or race, as the life course we each walk upon has different rules tailored to our specific goals, individuality, etc.  This is why we don't strive to imitate others, because we have a unique vocation in life that sets us on a different course, and we need to follow that to achieve our own particular success.  Again, our measure of success is not necessarily relevant to anyone else, as there is no uniform rule for success.  This is why too in our overly-consumerized culture we perhaps have lost our way.  We look at movie stars whose images are as shallow as a puddle of puppy urine, and society dictates that we have to look a certain way, think a certain thought, or buy a certain product to achieve their definition of "success."  The only ones who get successful from that in all honesty are greedy corporate entities who profit from our collective insecurities about ourselves, and to be honest it is so convoluted that even if a turnaround happened in society now, it would take decades (if not centuries!) to untangle the mess it has caused.  While others can inspire us and motivate us, we should not emulate them - we are our own persons, and what we are supposed to do is not necessarily the same as them. Until that sinks in, we will continue to have an unbalanced society. 

Any rate, the point is to strive for significance, and to have an awareness of our own model of success instead of trying to play "monkey see monkey do" with others.  If we do that, we may be more fulfilled.  Thanks again for allowing me to share, and will see you next time.